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detroitpedxing · 4 months ago

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Meet Susie Wiles, the ‘ice maiden’ who propelled Trump to victory – and his new chief of staff

On one hand, Susie Wiles is the generous neighbour who brings you casseroles and sends you flowers when you’re in the hospital. On the other, she’s a ruthless political operator who was the mastermind behind getting Donald Trump back to the White House. Alex Hannaford talks to those who know her to find out how she became one of the few people who can handle her boss...

On her Twitter/X profile, she wears a blouse and cardigan, drop earrings, and a gold necklace, her grey hair perfectly set. But Susie Wiles’ “Golden Girl”, grandmotherly image belies the role that consumes her. Wiles is one of the most powerful players in Republican politics, who ran Donald Trump’s campaign for re-election and who has just become his next chief of staff.

In his statement on Thursday evening Trump said that Wiles “just helped me achieve one of the greatest political victories in American history” and “is tough, smart, innovative, and is universally admired and respected”.

“It is a well deserved honour to have Susie as the first-ever female chief of staff in United States history,” he continued. “I have no doubt that she will make our country proud.”

Wiles, 67, is the first woman to be appointed White House chief of staff and in his victory speech in Florida the President-elect Donald Trump mentioned her previously little-known name seven times.

“Let me also express my tremendous appreciation for Susie and Chris —the job you did. Come, Susie,” Trump said. “Susie likes to stay in the back, let me tell you. We call her the ice maiden”, he joked, adding. “She is not in the background (anymore).”

A ruthless political operator, for the past 12 months her focus has been on absolute victory. And on Thursday evening, Trump confirmed her as his White House new chief of staff.

The Hill political newspaper called her “the most powerful Republican you don’t know”; The New York Times described her as “perhaps the most significant voice inside Mr Trump’s third presidential campaign”.

But who is she, and what makes this cake-baking, bird-watching 66-year-old grandmother tick?

Wiles has worked in Republican politics since the late 1970s and went on to become a campaign scheduler on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential bid, and later in his administration. In her late twenties, she moved from New Jersey, where she was born and raised, to Jacksonville, Florida, with her then-husband, Lanny, an “advance man” who handled publicity for candidates during political campaigns.

When the couple had their two daughters, Katie and Caroline, she took some time out to raise them but then went full-throttle back into the game – eventually running Trump’s Florida operations in his first bid to become president. Many attribute him winning the state by 1.2 percentage points over his rival Hillary Clinton to Wiles.

Choosing to stay in Florida instead of heading to the White House, Wiles focussed her efforts a couple of years later, on helping the Trump-anointed Ron DeSantis in his campaign to succeed Rick Scott as governor. Their relationship soured, with him blaming her for leaks and despite her denials, it is thought he was behind her ousting from the team. She officially left for health reasons in September 2019, but one friend of Wiles told me she was “really down at that point – at the very bottom”, and that leaving presented an existential crisis for her.

But then, in 2020, she got a call from Trump. He wanted her back on his team. And not only that, he wanted her to head it up.

Wiles’s father, Pat Summerall, was a professional football player and later a well-known sports broadcaster. Peter Schorsch, publisher of Florida Politics, who has known Wiles for a decade and considers her a friend, says Summerall would reach tens of millions of people each Sunday with his broadcasts and was such a voice of authority that he thinks some of that ability to take control; to command an audience, rubbed off on Wiles. Another former colleague and friend agreed that her gift as a “people person” was probably inherited from her dad but that her warm personality came from her mother, Katherine Jacobs, “who was a wonderful woman”.

However, it wasn’t all apple pie and roses. Summerall was an alcoholic and, after divorcing Katherine, was estranged from Wiles and her two siblings, Jay and Kyle, for some time. But, as an adult, Wiles left the door open for him to reconcile, and Summerall credited her with eventually helping get him into rehab for his addiction.

In 2017, Wiles and Lanny separated. Schorsch described it as a “quiet divorce between two prominent people” but he thinks it had the effect of freeing Wiles up to focus on her political career in her sixties, “to where she can be devoted to whoever her principal is at the time; undistracted when working on a candidate”.

Her soft edges however aren’t enough to hide a reputation for being a rottweiler, unafraid of baring her teeth. As a political operative, “Susie does not f*** around,” Schorsch says. “There is no other way to say it. It’s not that she’s hard, it’s not that she’s mean, but if you try to promote yourself or if you flimflam or you’re not honest about something, Susie will knife you herself.” It’s perhaps a trait her new boss is particularly fond of.

Schorsch recalls an instance when she oversaw the DeSantis campaign and a consultant who was brought in chose to speak to the media when they were told not to: “Susie immediately cut this person off and it took years for them to repair that relationship.”

But he says she also possesses this “southern grandmotherly kindness”. For example, he says, she knew the names of the volunteer working tirelessly for the campaign in a far-off county, and she takes care of the people working with her. “She’s very good at offering familial advice to a lot of her young staffers.” He recalls one such staffer had just had a baby and Wiles emphasised the importance of taking time off. “There’s an emphasis on making sure the people working for her are taking care of their home lives too.”

Schorsch says she’d very much fit into the kind of decorum and stagecraft that is a hallmark of British politics. Unlike her boss maybe “she just respects so much of the institutional stuff, the discipline of it all, while at the same time being a very savvy operator”.

It was a savvy “Team Trump” that recruited Wiles to the campaign. By taking all the “craziness” that surrounds Trump and adding what Schorsch calls a “disciplined ground game”, it seemed to be the sleight of hand helped Trump along to victory. Schorsch noted how Mar-a-Lago became “so much more disciplined since Susie became the chief gatekeeper.”

What’s more, he thinks that Wiles sees no need to rein in Trump’s worst excesses. “It’s a much more pragmatic ‘let Trump be Trump’ philosophy: he says certain things to the Maga crowd, but he also offers an incredible tax policy to the billionaire crowd, and they like that. I don’t want to say she’s made a deal with the devil, but she knows what Trump’s about.”

It’s this ability to think two things at once and instinct to know what people want that makes her such a smart operator. John Delaney hired Wiles when he ran a successful campaign to become mayor of Jacksonville back in 1995, after which she became his chief of staff.

“Four weeks into the campaign she kind of transformed the thinking and the messaging,” he says. And there are certain Trumpian elements to her too – in terms of her ability to connect with a crowd and give them exactly what they want. “She is an absolutely brilliant political savant with incredible instincts about what the public thinks; what can fly,” Delaney says.

Delaney says Wiles wants to help the people she works for reach the goals they are aiming for, even if she doesn’t always agree entirely with their politics. “She has no ego. She’s very much a behind-the-scenes person.” But despite friends and colleagues being willing to talk about her and her ability to do a difficult job, she remains an enigma and fiercely guards her personal life. Even members of the Trump campaign are reluctant to talk about her.

As for working for Trump, Wiles might not always agree with his delivery, his choice of words or even his political stance on an issue, but Delaney says politics is about what people can overlook in one candidate and what they can’t overlook in another. In that way, she’s very much like the voters who might have held their noses at the ballot box; “dyed in the wool” Republicans who may not have loved their candidate, but who got over the line.

Delaney doubts that Wiles’ politics always chime with Trump’s. “She would be what I’d call left on LGBT+ issues. And I can’t believe she would necessarily agree naturally with Donald Trump on immigration, but that’s more me speculating.”

Delaney agrees with Schorsch that, political career aside, Wiles is a sweet, good-natured person. “If she lived in your neighbourhood and you were sick, she’d bring over a casserole,” he says. “If you needed an electrician to be let into your house, she’d figure out how to do that. And if you were in the hospital, she’d visit and send you flowers. She’s just a really nice person.”

When Wiles is at home, he says she likes to tend her garden and she enjoys cooking. She’s known to be an avid birdwatcher, too, although as one person who knows her told me, “I doubt she’s doing much birdwatching at the moment.”

“And she’s crazy about her girls and her grandkids,” Delaney says. She’s not flashy, doesn’t splurge on five-star hotels, and he says as a practising Episcopalian she’s a “church-every-Sunday person and prays frequently”.

Nate Monroe, a columnist for the Florida Times-Union newspaper who has known Wiles in his capacity as a journalist for a decade, says her critics would say that sweet, personable demeanour “masks a very, very calculating, hard-charging operator. As much as she is very well thought of, she is equally feared. And she is a dangerous person to cross.”

In January, Monroe penned a devastating editorial, castigating DeSantis for his presidential campaign and pointing out personal traits which ensure he “always chooses cruelty over kindness, dog whistles over empathy, divisiveness over grace”. Just to ensure the knife was well and truly twisted, Monroe added: “Who was it that Trump called out during his victory speech [in Iowa], that diminutive figure standing at the periphery of his entourage on stage? Susie Wiles, the adviser DeSantis cast out, is one of Trump’s most trusted confidantes. Oops.”

Monroe says those familiar with Wiles knew that by cutting her out of his inner circle – and humiliating her in the process – DeSantis would eventually get his comeuppance. He also says Wiles is “almost allergic to drama” – which may sound illogical – comical, even – when you consider who her boss is. But Monroe has another take. Perhaps it’s a good fit. Perhaps, in Susie Wiles, Donald Trump has found a calm, steady hand.

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detroitpedxing · 4 months ago

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(Archived News, Sept. 17. 2024) Second Apparent Assassination Attempt on Trump Prompts Alarm Abroad

There is widespread concern that the November election will not end well and that American democracy has frayed to the breaking point.

In the nine years since Donald J. Trump entered American politics, the global perception of the United States has been shaken by the image of a fractured, unpredictable nation. First one, then a second apparent attempt on the former president’s life have accentuated international concerns, raising fears of violent turmoil spiraling toward civil war.

Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, has said he is “very worried” and “deeply troubled” by what the F.B.I. said was an attempt to kill Mr. Trump at his Florida golf course, fewer than 50 days before the presidential election and two months after a bullet bloodied the ear of Mr. Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

“Violence has no part to play at all in any political process,” Mr. Starmer said.

Yet, violence has played a core part in this stormy, lurching American political campaign, and not only in the two apparent assassination attempts. There is now widespread concern across the globe that the November election will not end well and that American democracy, once a beacon to the world, has frayed to the breaking point.

In Mexico, where elections this year were the most violent in the country’s recent history, with 41 candidates and aspirants for public office assassinated, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said in a post on X, formerly Twitter: “Even though what happened is still unclear, we regret the violence against former President Donald Trump. The path is democracy and peace.”

At a time of wars in Europe and the Middle East and widespread global insecurity as China and Russia assert the superiority of their autocratic models, American precariousness weighs heavily.

Corentin Sellin, a French history professor, said the “brutalization of American politics” had left France “wondering whether the presidential campaign will finish peacefully.”

France was stunned, he said, by the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters, and “there is this notion that the story that started with that insurrection has not yet ended,” and that the Nov. 5 election will determine how it does.

The threat of violence — at times, even the need for it — has been a core part of Mr. Trump’s message.

He has already cast doubt on the credibility of the coming November election results. He has persistently laced his language with calls to “fight” and used incendiary terms to insult immigrants. Just before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, he urged followers to “fight like hell” or they would not “have a country any more.” In general, he has shown an ironclad incapacity to accept many truths, including the result of the 2020 election.

Democrats have responded by depicting Mr. Trump as a direct menace to American democracy, a “weird” would-be autocrat of fascist tendencies and a “threat to our freedoms,” in the words of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. The left-leaning New Republic magazine portrayed Mr. Trump as Hitler on a recent cover, expressing the view that a second Trump term is likely to lead to some form of American tyranny.

Some Europeans see things in a very different light.

“They tried to do everything,” said Andrea Di Giuseppe, a lawmaker with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing Brothers of Italy party. “They tried to bring Trump down with trials, they tried to bring him down with insinuations, they tried to bring him down by scaring people that ‘if Trump arrives democracy ends.’ Then, since all these attempts did not work, they tried to kill him.”

The authorities have identified a suspect in the Florida episode, Ryan W. Routh, a 58-year-old building contractor with a criminal history and a passionate embrace of the Ukrainian cause. He was charged in federal court with two firearms counts. More charges may follow.

Responding to the apparent assassination attempt, Carsten Luther, an online editor for international affairs, gave voice to deep concerns about the survival of American democracy in the respected German weekly Die Zeit. “The warnings of a civil war can be heard and no longer sound completely unrealistic,” he wrote. “It seems almost banal, as if it was bound to happen at some point.”

Of course, other Western societies, including France and Germany, are also viscerally divided and have seen the rise of xenophobic, far-right parties with many of the same messages as Mr. Trump. In May, an assassination attempt on Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia left him critically injured.

But a far more restrictive European gun culture has curbed the extent of political violence while leaving Europeans alarmed and incredulous at the ease with which Americans are able to obtain weapons.

Félix Maradiaga, a former Nicaraguan presidential candidate and political prisoner who is now a fellow at the University of Virginia, said that polarization, intolerance and the widespread availability of high-caliber weapons in the United States had led to a “perfect storm.”

“The world is watching, and the stakes could not be higher,” he added. “Russia and China are undoubtedly taking satisfaction in this deterioration of democracy.”

Lebohang Pheko, a senior research fellow at South Africa’s Trade Collective, an economics research institute, said that she perceived “a militarization of everyday life in the United States, and this essentially seems to be spilling into these elections.”

Mr. Trump has often appeared to seek this very militarization of which he has narrowly escaped being a victim. The multimillionaire son of a real-estate developer from Queens, he has positioned himself as the defender of the gun-toting, God-fearing American frontier against what he portrays as the Democrats’ politically correct socialist takeover.

Alluding to his Democratic opponents, he has blamed “the things that they say about me” for the first assassination attempt and the second episode, not the easy access to guns that he defends.

The question now is how violent will this political confrontation in America prove. For many around the world, it seems to contain the seeds of rampant conflict.

“There is a sort of reciprocal delegitimization, where the political opponent is no longer a normal political competitor, but also an existential enemy,” said Mario Del Pero, a professor of United States and International History at Sciences Po University in Paris. He called this process “a degradation of political and public discourse.”

In the United States, this has been a degradation compounded by guns, as much of the world sees it.

“Style over substance. Image over issues. Lies over facts. Distractions over policy. Repeated violence,” said Tomasz Płudowski, the deputy dean of the School of Social Science, AEH, in Warsaw. “That seems to be the contemporary American reality.”

The core confrontation in Western societies is no longer over internal issues. It is global vs. national, the connected living in the “somewhere” of the knowledge economy vs. the forgotten living “nowhere” in industrial wastelands and rural areas.

There lies the frustration, even fury, on which a Trump or a Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right French National Rally, or Ms. Meloni in Italy have been able to build.

The perceived vulnerability of American democracy has already provoked many reactions around the world, from Russian gloating and interference to European anxiety about its security. Few countries in the developing world want American lessons in how to run their societies these days.

Yet, a fascination with the United States endures, and the checks and balances of its institutions have proved resilient, including through the first Trump term.

Mr. Trump often cites the template of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary: neutralizing an independent judiciary, subjugating much of the media, demonizing migrants and creating loyal new elites through crony capitalism. But it would not be easy to impose in America.

Still, the world is anxious. The 48 days to the election feel like a long time.

“In the end, the only real final word is for the American people,” said Mr. Di Giuseppe, the Italian lawmaker. “And if you want to defeat a person whom you think is not fit to govern the United States of America, you have to defeat him in a democratic system with elections, not with justice or Kalashnikovs.”

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